Due to the interest in hosted computing and cloud computing, many computing environments can provide virtualization of hosted operating systems. In such virtualization environments, a hypervisor can allow multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host computer. Another name for a hypervisor may be a virtual machine monitor (VMM). A hypervisor can be thought of as a core of a virtualization platform, and the hypervisor typically has access to and manages the access to the physical host hardware. In addition, a hypervisor can access and manage privileged partitions, such as a primary partition, which can be used for management and I/O virtualization purposes.
The hypervisor can present guest operating systems or guest partitions with a virtual platform and can monitor the execution of the guest operating systems. In that way, multiple operating systems, including multiple instances of the same operating system, can share hardware resources. The virtual machine approach using a hypervisor can isolate failures in one operating system from other operating systems sharing the hardware.